About 700 million years ago, Earth froze over so completely that even tropical oceans turned to ice, an episode scientists call Snowball Earth. New research now points to an overlooked accomplice in ...

More than a billion years ago, a shallow basin in what is now northern Ontario held a subtropical lake. The setting likely resembled modern Death Valley, where heat drives evaporation and leaves salt ...

Working from home may feel like a practice inextricably linked with the COVID-19 pandemic. But as it turns out, some ancient Maya salt makers were living and working in the same place, too. That’s the ...

Salt is an essential nutrient for the human body. But hundreds of millions of years before the first humans, salt minerals once shaped entire landscapes. They even determined where early life on Earth ...